Category Archives: Sci-Fi

There are very few directors whose name on a movie will convince me to see it immediately, lacking all other information or context (Darren Aronofsky and Guillermo del Toro spring to mind.) Denis Villeneuve – of “Prisoners” and “Sicario” renown – is one of those few directors.

Yes, this is a movie about aliens, but it’s largely unlike anything you’ve seen before. The concept is elegantly simple: when mysterious alien vessels appear across the world, the U.S. government calls in language expert Louise Banks (a fantastic Amy Adams) to help communicate with the inhabitants. Contrary to what one might suspect, this is not a film that strays into grand philosophizing about colonialism, progress, and the nature of man. Instead, “Arrival” maintains a laser focus on just one question: how do you make peaceful contact with an utterly alien race that doesn’t even share the most rudimentary elements of human language?

In probing that question, Villeneuve takes his viewers on a deep dive into linguistic theory that (almost) never succumbs to the temptation to “dumb things down.” This is the most cerebral movie I’ve ever seen in wide-release – a tour de force of hard science fiction that assumes its audience’s intelligence.

One sense lingers strongest upon exiting the theater: Villeneuve is a wonderful filmmaker. The movie’s first act positively bleeds tension (on the level of the “Sicario” checkpoint sequence), but this tension is of a particularly high-level sort: “Arrival” features no city-leveling battles, gory murders, or transcendental journeys. Instead, the real threat here is miscommunication: provoking the enigmatic aliens into doing something world-destroying through improper translation strategy.

Moreover, this is far less a movie about aliens than it is about Louise and her work, which gives the film a deeply grounded sense of realism: were this scenario to occur tomorrow, I am fairly confident things would play out almost exactly as Villeneuve depicts them onscreen. The characters of “Arrival” – including Jeremy Renner as a physicist and Forest Whitaker as an Army general – are hopeful, venal, brilliant, and tormented in equal measure, imbuing the movie with an even stronger aura of plausibility.

This film is, in many ways, a spiritual companion piece to Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar” (except set on earth rather than in space). However, “Arrival” doesn’t handle its emotional beats nearly as smoothly. At heart, this is a very geeky movie about science and language, not the “human experience” in all its fullness – and yet it periodically lapses into odd tonal shifts that do not fit well. “Interstellar” might have successfully made you tear up; “Arrival” almost certainly will not.

“Arrival” also suffers from a frustrating tendency to overexplain itself. Without giving too much away, the movie contains a staggering third-act revelation (of the spit-out-your-popcorn, “Sixth Sense” variety) that is both brilliant and maddening, and that potentially lends itself to either awe or parody. Absent the overexplanation, this twist would remain firmly in the “brilliant” realm – but as it is, certain elements feel just a bit off.

All in all, “Arrival” is a gripping story that falls just short of legitimate greatness (if I had to guess, I’d theorize that studio meddling is responsible for the slightly-truncated runtime and hints of sentimentalism). If you are a fan of Crichton-style sci-fi, though, this is not a movie to miss.

VERDICT: 8/10
It doesn’t totally stick its landing, but “Arrival” remains a brilliant departure from the sci-fi norm.

Normalized Score: 5.8

If you’re anything like me, you’ve probably forgotten (several times) that the third installment of the Star Trek reboot series was coming out this summer. Couple this with a truly horrendous marketing campaign that looked nothing like Star Trek, and you’ve got the makings of a bona fide series-ending disaster.

Well, I was very wrong indeed.

“Star Trek Beyond” – helmed by “Fast and Furious” veteran director Justin Lin – is to the rebooted Star Trek series what “Skyfall” was to the Daniel Craig string of James Bond films – a joyous throwback to a simpler era of moviemaking, successfully stripped of any overwrought franchise deadweight.

The storyline is vintage Star Trek in its purest form: a ship goes missing in an uncharted nebula, and the crew of the Enterprise must investigate. They promptly find themselves shipwrecked on a dangerous planet, where they must contend with a megalomaniacal villain who plans to start an interstellar war.

Despite the familiarity of these tropes, “Beyond” doesn’t come off as derivative or hokey. Actually, it’s rather pleasant to see an adventure story told with refreshing earnestness. It’s become commonplace for blockbuster scripts to be little more than a series of snarky one-liners on the parts of the protagonists (Marvel is the chief offender here), which leads to some cognitive dissonance when nonstop humor is juxtaposed with apocalyptic destruction. This mismatch produces a distinct narrative weightlessness: everyone in the audience knows the status quo will remain more or less undisturbed, no matter how catastrophic the explosions onscreen. That isn’t the case in “Beyond”: characters react to dire circumstances with an appropriate gravitas that, at the same time, never comes off as too self-serious.

Artistically, “Beyond” delivers on all fronts. The effects are great and (in general) don’t overwhelm character development. Happily, director Lin tempers his action-junkie impulses and lets his actors actually talk to one another, which lends “Beyond” an unexpected resonance. And somewhat along these lines, I’m pretty sure many of the alien characters are real people in prostheses rather than motion-capture creations – an artistic decision which does the film a great service. Star Trek has a very different aesthetic from Star Wars, and previous franchise director J.J. Abrams sometimes elided the distinction. The third act of “Beyond” goes a bit overboard with generic CGI pyrotechnics, and there’s a missed opportunity for some thought-provoking engagement with themes of colonialism and culture, but these are minor gripes.

In addition to being a great summer action flick, “Beyond” is a testament to the virtue of purging extraneous worldbuilding; mercifully, it’s not jammed full of setup for future installments. This makes complete sense and is an approach more franchises should adopt: if there’s a new Star Trek movie, I will be happy to see it even if it doesn’t tie in directly to its predecessors. The one-off storytelling approach taken by “Beyond” is vastly preferable to the dense muddle that was “Into Darkness.”

In short, even if Star Wars is more your thing, go see “Beyond.” It’s simply too much fun to pass up.

VERDICT: 9/10
Ignore the bad advertising: “Beyond” is the most enjoyable blockbuster of the summer.

Normalized Score: 7.9

Addendum: I shelled out some extra cash to see this in IMAX 3D at the monster-sized Smithsonian Air and Space Museum theater. It was worth every penny.